


The Nature Of Daylight

by Analinea



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Arrival AU, Bittersweet Ending, Character Death, Derek POV, Getting Together, I did too much research for how little comes up in this fic, M/M, Mutual Pining, Open Ending, Time Travel, i need to stop using the tags like this, kid fic (of a sort), like what even is canon in this i don't even know when it takes place, not the main pairing but read the notes for info, the monster of the week is not a monster
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 12:11:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18894385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Analinea/pseuds/Analinea
Summary: Derek wakes up and goes through the motions, waiting for something to make it worth it. He realizes that he already found it– it's not how he thought his story would go.





	The Nature Of Daylight

**Author's Note:**

> If you've seen Arrival, you know where this is going; if you haven't seen Arrival and want to, go watch the movie first because this'll spoil the surprise.  
> This was prompted by angrydevil in a comment on Breath on a mirror; this is probably not what they had in mind but after making a long ass list of all the time travel stories I enjoyed, this felt like a writing challenge. I'll let you guys judge the success of it.  
> Regarding the character death, if child illnesses and death are hard for you, please take care of yourself and close this tab cause it's talked about.  
> I deeply apologize to any ghost of Etruscan people, I used three different glossaries for the words I used and–
> 
> Also I did the last edits while catching up on the eurovision so blame Cyprus or Slovenia for any mistakes :)  
> Title from On The Nature Of Daylight by Max Richter

It's raining outside, the pitter-patter of drops soothing an anxiety Derek wasn't entirely aware of feeling, that has been a part of him for so long he can only notice the absence of it.

The rhythm of the rain is joined by soft steps almost inaudible, a domestic sound that he can't quite place for a moment. Then she turns the corner -he sees her reflection in the window he's looking out from.

“Dad?” her little voice says. He loves her so much it's filling the empty spaces. He never thought he could feel like this again.

“Yeah, moonlight?” he turns to her. The nickname is a familiar weight on his tongue that vanishes as soon as he tries to chase the idea of it.

Dread settles alongside love, both nestled so close to his heart he can barely breathe around it all. She looks at him like she gets it, like she's cursed too.

He wishes he could take it away from her.

“It hurts again,” she says, so tiny. Her eyes flicker -brown to gold to blue back to brown- and Derek remembers.

He's sitting next to a hospital bed -her beginning, their beginning- and she's the smallest thing in the world, he's so afraid to shatter her.

He's sitting next to her hospital bed -a story coming to its end.

“Moonlight,” he says to the baby in his arms.

“Moonlight,” he says, and she looks younger than she is under the white and blue sheets, surrounded by machines that can't do anything for her. She's too young. She would never be old enough, for this.

Derek feels so alone already; she's half gone.

“I'll be there as long as you need me,” he whispers as she closes her eyes and he swears she smiles her first smile right then, barely a day old. A good omen.

“It's gonna be alright, moonlight,” he lies easily, the hardest thing he ever had to learn how to do, “I'll be there.”

Derek blinks the tears out of his eyes, her hand in his.

He blinks again.

He looks out the windows at the forest. Him and the trees, they're the last ones standing. He's tired of losing everyone but himself. But despite it all, he keeps going; something will make it worth it, he hopes. He hopes. It's all he has left.

 

Derek wakes up. If he keeps his eyes closed maybe the world won't notice he's not asleep anymore, maybe he'll get a day off from life.

He sighs. Sits up. Never giving up is one of Laura's lesson -he intends to honor her. So he gets up, and eats, and showers, gets dressed and out of the house. _Something will make it worth it_ , Laura used to say.

The Camaro is her last gift, as unintentional as it had been. Derek wants to wreck it, that's how much he hates it. He's wanted a van since he was a kid, just like his parents: it means you have enough people to fill it, enough vacations to use it. But he has the Camaro that still smells faintly like his sister instead.

He drives it like she would: recklessly. Cora loved it while she was here, wind in her hair and a sense of danger that doesn't come with claws and fangs. He wishes she could've had a different life. There's so many people Derek would have wanted her to know.

“Derek,” Argent greets him at the door before stepping to the side to let him in. Derek goes to the office where he is the last one to arrive.

His eyes catch Stiles'. Something that Derek can't identify pass between them. It makes the new magic under Stiles' skin flare up; it's growing like vines rooted in his veins and bones. Only Derek can sense it -only Derek is worried. Someday, Stiles will let his magic eat him whole. That's just who he is.

For now, he says nothing and stays away. Focuses on the latest crisis.

“Remember, we don't know what it is, only that Stiles' magic sensed it somewhere on the north side of the Preserve. We won't shoot first, but we'll be ready to act if needed.”

Derek nods. Caution -once bitten or something like that, except they've been bitten a lot more around here.

Kira catches a ride with him. It's not surprising anymore, they've been building a friendship over the last few months. Derek helps her practice her Japanese to surprise her mother, and together they learn Korean so she can surprise her father. She's a breath of fresh air on old forgotten paths: foreign languages used to be Derek's passion. A kid's way to dream.

Doing that again, starting small, it feels like taking the first steps towards wanting to get up in the mornings.

It's not much, but it can be enough.

 

Times freezes. Unnatural dusk falls on the forest, making it go quiet. Derek forgets about everyone else, worry fading away. He steps closer.

This lake. There's never been a lake here. It's clear and smooth as a mirror, drawing him in. He tilts his head to the side, not afraid but curious. Nervous like wanting to impress. Awed, though he doesn't yet know at what. He stops just at the edge of– that's not water. He has no idea what it is.

“What are you?” he whispers to the empty air. Grass cracks when Stiles comes to stand next to him, as if it's covered in frost -but it's the middle of summer.

Fog curls on the surface to answer, slowly and all at once. It swirls away in the middle when something breaches the surface, staying half submerged but making no ripples.

Flowing black hair, freckled brown skin, eyes shining as gold as the circlet on her forehead. Her smile is tender but her eyes are sad. She has a hammer in one hand, a nail in the other -presented without threat to them.

She's human sized, but she's too massive to comprehend.

“Who are you?” Derek croaks out again.

A cacophony of sounds and voices erupt, deafening but also blinding. Derek closes his eyes, overwhelmed. He doesn't feel himself stumble back. When he can see again, she's offering her tools; but he can't reach her.

“I don't understand,” he says in unison with Stiles.

The voices echo again, softer. Then in a blink, she's gone. Light and sound come back all at once; Derek falls to his knees, overwhelmed. Worried words drift around him just out of reach.

“What happened? What did she do?”

“I don't know,” Derek whispers. He looks at the empty clearing. “She was so sad.”

 

Waking up is a slow process. The sun is already cutting a square of light on the other side of the bedroom: noon has come and passed. Derek has rarely slept that long, even when his life was a quiet one.

“You were pretty drained,” Stiles says through the phone, worry in his voice that Derek wishes he could soothe.

“I remember your hands shaking after leaving Deaton, are you feeling better too?” Memories from the night before are fuzzy at best but he remembers Stiles trying to hide his hands in his pockets. If he hadn't been so tired, Derek would've panicked at seeing him so pale, eyes half-lidded.

Stiles groans, “I'd just puked the day's food, give me a break. I felt better as soon as I ate.”

“Charming,” Derek answers, a smile on his lips he doesn't want to convey through his voice. “I have better things to do until tonight's meeting than talk about vomit so I'll hung up now.”

“Hey, you're the one who called me!” Stiles protests from afar as Derek takes the phone away from his ear and presses the red button.

“Did I?” he asks himself, not sure what came over him if he actually did. Social calls aren't exactly his thing, usually.

He reads until the meeting -he didn't lie to Stiles when he declared having better things to do. Books are his safe haven and these are his family's. He's meticulously going through those that were salvaged from the fire, or retrieved from storage. Keeping some, giving some away; making the library his own, one book at a time.

He's been doing that a lot since Laura's death. He can't explain it.

Rebuilding the house and moving back in Beacon Hills had been her idea: New-York too noisy for wood born wolves. She'd had big, ordinary dreams like him; a quiet life and a good job, travels and lounging in the sun. She just had a more frantic approach to life.

“What do you want the most?” she used to ask, blueprints spread out in front of them.

“Whatever you want, I want,” Derek answered each time, too afraid to wish things for himself after all of his bad choices. He let her take all the decisions back then, no matter her sad looks, her soft insistence, her tough love when everything else failed.

“Do you remember,” Laura started another time, something she did a lot to keep the past alive as much as she could, “when we asked Cora what she wanted to be when she grew up?”

Laughing didn't come easy to Derek but he did that time, staining the cold night with his white breath. “She said she wanted to be an aunt like Auntie Sarah.”

“You told her we were a little too young for that but she was so convinced we were grown ups.”

“I still don't feel like a grown up now,” Derek confessed, scared of the life he had to start living. Laura's silence was filled with the sound of cars, sirens, street vendors, everything they tried to get used to but couldn't.

He thinks now about Cora. How she never asked about Derek's life between the fire and their reunion, living in a future that didn't allow space for the unbearable feeling of having been left behind. Maybe that's why she left again: because Derek longed to make his past a part of her and she only offered a future Derek couldn't quite yet step into.

But he's starting now. He'll find his way to her, eventually -maybe they'll even meet in the middle.

 

“Did you feel it?” Stiles asks after the meeting, words coming from the faraway place inside of him he's staring into at the moment. “Her begging for something.” He emerges back and turns to Derek who loses himself in his brown eyes. Soil filled with sparks of magic, ready to make things grow.

“She tried to give me something,” Derek notes absently.

“Why? Why just the two of us?”

“Taurath,” Derek suddenly says, throat catching on the harsh _r_.

“Bless you,” Stiles shoots back.

Derek gives him his best unimpressed look. “That's something I remember hearing, in the middle of the voices.”

“What does it mean then?”

Derek sits back in his chair, pensive. The feeling that he's supposed to know nags him. He doesn't answer. Instead he says, “Maybe it's nothing special, just that we're the most used to magic so we could hear her. We don't even know if she'll be back.”

Maybe they weren't chosen; or perhaps they're so used to the suffocating feeling of screaming in the void, where no air can carry the sound to people who should hear it, that they're the only ones left to catch the calls of the desperate and the forgotten.

Derek has a second to wonder if Erica, Boyd, Isaac– would they have heard it, too?

“No,” Stiles says, “she was too desperate for something, she'll come back.” He sighs. “I can't stop being afraid,” he confesses, softly. “Not of her, but because I'm actually not scared of her. Does that make sense? She just doesn't feel like a threat and I want to consider that threatening in itself. We've been tricked before.”

It's a ridiculous hope, to believe for one second that not everyone is out to get them. Derek has the same feeling, like expecting one last stair and stumbling when you find none. But Stiles has this light in his eye, a beacon begging for a rescue from the lonely, isolating island of mistrust. To be taken somewhere he can start growing again.

“We have,” Derek acknowledges. They stay silent for a while, staring in each other's eyes for a too long moment. “Guess we'll just have to go to her again to make sure.”

Stiles smiles, “We,” he repeats like that's the important part. Derek feels something flutter in his guts -like daring yourself to step out of a plane, the last second before the free fall.

 

Derek falls asleep without urgency. He's tired, not exhausted.

He's hiding behind a tree, head tipped back against the trunk, listening. He's smiling -it feels foreign because it's so big on his face. Like the happiness is flowing out of him too fast.

Around him he can hear the leaves and the animals, and the tinny tiny steps of a little night creature that believes herself more stealthy than she actually is.

“Found you!” she shouts, their laughs echoing around the sound of a dozen birds flying off, startled.

Derek takes off running, not so fast that she can't catch him but she's half-wolf after all. She screams in delight as she chases him, tackles him and he pretends the force is enough to push him to the ground. He shields her from the wet earth as he falls. “Little Red got the wolf!”

“Dad,” she whines, “we don't play Little Red anymore!”

“Oh right,” Derek remembers. “You're an animal whisperer.”

She frowns. “I don't whisper, I talk to them,” she declares seriously.

Derek closes his eyes against a sudden ache, against the obvious absence of the last member of their family.

When he opens them again, he's in his bed, and his heart hurts so much he loses his breath. The first sob is a wrenching release of the bubbles of pain he tries to hold inside with a hand on his mouth. His lungs don't want to expend again and for a wild second Derek firmly believes he'll suffocate.

By the time he manages to get out of bed, washed out by the tears to nothing but a skeleton of hollow bones, the sun is high in the sky.

His phone pings. It's so heavy in his hand.

 _She's back_ , Stiles says, their secret.

Derek blinks, and he's walking through the forest. Shock, probably. He shouldn't be out following his instincts right now. He keeps going.

Stiles is already by the impossible lake, the only sound their own breathing, so loud over the distant waves of their own blood flow.

She emerges, massive, small. Offering. A thousand voices, overlapping.

Derek doubles over, barely feeling Stiles hand on his back, not hearing his panic. Then it stops. Derek falls to his knees, catching his breath, looks at her expectant face.

“Derek?”

“I– I heard...uh,” he hesitates, breathes, “'alicha', and um, 'niseth'.”

Stiles looks up at her too. “What do you want?” he shouts.

More clearly and for the both of them, like Derek repeating the words made her find the right frequency, she repeats. “Alicha.”

“What does that mean?” Stiles asks, desperately.

She closes her mouth, visibly frustrated. In the space of a heartbeat, she's gone; the forest comes alive around them again.

 

“Do you have any idea what language she was speaking?” Stiles asks, sitting on the porch steps.

“What's this one?” she points at a word in the book from where she's sitting on his lap, her little swinging feet bruising Derek's shins as fast as he heals. He looks over her shoulder at the one she's indicating, her wild hair tickling his nose. It looks like her grandfather's.

“Hmm,” he answers, “Hades.”

“Like, the god of death?”

“The Greek god of the underworld.”

“But this is not Greek,” she points out. She's so clever already, Derek thinks.

“Etruscan,” he says to Stiles, head snapping up with how fast his mind is going now.

“Etruscan? What's that, some kind of Spanish?” Stiles asks, confused.

Derek hesitates for a second to give away that part of himself he thought buried in ashes, the one that could be so passionate. The one that didn't know hurt other than scrapped knees healing instantly and angry parents at showing off a little too much in front of his high school friends with a basketball. The one from a time when any dream was a fingertip away from becoming real -and Derek's were so simple.

A quiet life full of books and family trips to faraway lands. He was going to speak every language on Earth and some not spoken anymore too -that was his only ambition.

“No, it's a– dead language,” Derek decides to trust Stiles with, “from ancient Italy.”

The way Stiles looks at him. Like he sees the Derek he wanted to be as a kid; smart and cultured just like his mother and her mother before her. Stiles doesn't comment and it's like he already knew.

Derek has a brutal realization in this single instant, there and gone again so fast he can't grasp it long enough to name it.

He gets up. “I have a pile of books somewhere with the one I need for this.”

Stiles takes a step as if to follow, stops and swings back and forth on the ball of his feet. Unsure. “It's late,” he points over his shoulder like a signal he waits for Derek to understand.

Which he doesn't. So Stiles lets his hand drop with the weight of a disappointment Derek fails to lift, no matter how much he wants to, Moon, how he does.

With an awkward wave and a spin, Stiles is gone; in the silence and the night that follows, Derek avoids sleep and thoughts by looking for the right book, and the right informations.

 

“Gift, a dead person, and seer,” Derek announces with as much intonation than for a grocery list.

“Um,” Stiles answers, towel clutched around his waist and face a wild shade of red. “Context? And privacy.”

Derek huffs but turns around. “The words.”

“Speaking of, I had some with Scott,” Stiles says over rustling fabric and unsteady heartbeat. “He was mad we went alone.”

Derek turns, sharing a look, an understanding, with Stiles. Maybe it's bizarre to feel this way, but this is _theirs_.

Stiles crouches at the tree line in front of his house, a stain of red flannel on the dark brown trees, while Derek waits for him by the Jeep. When he gets back up and facing Derek, he seems to suddenly remember he wasn't alone.

“I was,” he trails off, embarrassed. “Asking some birds if they knew anything.”

“You can talk to birds,” Derek states, waiting for it to be a joke.

Stiles observes him strangely, a flash of something old as the Nemeton in his eyes -as dangerous, but very much alive. “I can,” he declares like a challenge, then breaks the spell with a chuckle, “I guess I should learn what they're called if I don't want to be rude though.”

“Do they know what _you_ 're called?”

“Do any of you?” Stiles laughs, mischievous.

Derek has an image of brown eyes flickering to gold, to blue, back to brown; not sure what any of this means. He gets in the car, having no answer to offer Stiles.

“Who's the dead?” Stiles finally asks about the words Derek came to him with.

“What's the gift?” Derek counters, not wanting to think about the long list of possibility when it comes to people they lost.

Stiles is silent a long time. “Which one of us is the seer?”

Derek frowns. “What makes you think it's one of us?”

“Wishful thinking. Better one of us be cursed than anybody else, right?” Stiles shrugs, focusing back on the road in front of him.

Derek is left to wonder. Isn't it only a curse if you think the only thing you'll see is pain? If you think you'll be powerless to change it?

 

Derek thought he knew how his story went, sunlight to moonlight, beginning, middle, and end.

He holds on for something new to come along but he's done letting despair and immaturity dictate his choices. He won't make the mistake a second time, the one that put death on Erica, Boyd, Isaac's path.

He'll do everything to be ready next time he has to take responsibility for young lives -and he'll never bite someone as desperate as him again.

“Is being an Alpha like being a parent?” Scott asked once, worried about his role.

Air had been hard to find to form the answer. “It's different for everyone,” Derek had forced through a dry throat, words scrapping him raw.

“If you're my dad, why aren't you my Alpha?” she asks.

He wants to tell her, “Go ask–” but there's no one else when he looks around and the loneliness draped over every piece of furniture chokes him. He has her, yes, but...

“I made a drawing,” she offers him a wrinkled piece of printer paper.

“Oh?” he prompts, taking it and turning it upright.

“That's you,” she points to the big guy with eyes hesitating between too many colors and turning muddy where the paper isn't teared through by the pens, “and that's me,” the little girl with a bird on her shoulder and a bunny at her feet.

She doesn't say anything about the gray square surrounded by flowers; Derek wishes the only absence in her life was the graves'.

He wishes she wasn't so resigned she'd have drawn two parents alive -aren't drawings like dreams? He doesn't know what would be worse on paper, her doomed hope or this quiet reality.

“It's a lot of flowers,” he remarks instead. She looks at their barren garden and Derek follows her gaze. He doesn't know when he let it die but he thinks that making things grow isn't worth it when you know it's destined to fail, wither up, turn to dust.

He looks back at her and can't bear his reflection in her eyes.

“And what's this?” Derek clears his throat and heart with. It's behind the two dimensional abundance of dreamed flowers, at the foot of the headstone. Tools he remembers seeing in massive, impossible hands.

“Fate,” Derek says.

“What is?” Stiles asks distractedly.

“The hammer and the nail.”

Stiles looks somber for an instant, mind gone by association to sealed coffins instead of hanged pictures; Derek can relate. “I don't get it.”

Derek gets up, goes to the book he translated the words with. “I saw something about it in here,” he turns the pages, stops on a drawing he didn't pay attention to before. Stiles steps besides him and inhales sharply.

“W– who is that?” he tears he book from Derek's hands. On the page, three figures: one of them holds a hammer in one hand, a nail in the other. No coincidence can be that accurate.

“The Romans called her Athrpa,” Derek reads underneath, “the Etruscan Nortia, among other names. Goddess of time, chance, destiny and the fate she fixes -as in settles- with her tools.”

Stiles has disbelief in his eyes when he looks up at Derek. “Are you really saying we have a goddess from a tiny part of ancient Italy in the Preserve of Beacon Hills, California?” he flails around, laughing with a touch of hysteria. This should be improbable, but after demons and magic, is it really that impossible? When does it get too unrealistic except when they finally decide they're done with this life.

 

The revelation of identity doesn't change much. “A bird came back this morning,” Stiles is pacing, wired up by the absence of a new apparition. It's been too long, feels like withdrawal. Maybe it should be worrying, how much they want to see her again, to understand.

“What did it say?” Derek's eyes follow Stiles, the same floorboard making him wince at every of Stiles' pass that makes it creak.

“Something old is dying in the forest,” Stiles spins, retraces his steps, “said that it's in its last inhale.”

A last inhale for a last exhale, and Derek pictures her impossibly more than human frame in a hospital bed suddenly -it's too much for him to think about.

“Can you stop?” Derek snaps suddenly, surprising himself.

Stiles freezes, eyes wide with guilt and embarrassment. “It's harder for me to stay still than for you to put up with me moving, you know,” voice too hurt to be as angry as he seems to want to be.

“I was talking about the– the,” Derek fumbles with the misunderstanding, feeling like the biggest idiot. “The floorboard.”

Stiles glances down. “Oh,” he deflates. Then strangely, he smiles. “Oh,” he repeats with humor. He tilts his head to the side, smile mischievous in this particular way that accelerates Derek's heartbeat. Magic crackles in the air, distorts the air around Stiles. “Fixed,” he says, cocky.

Derek blinks. He gets up and tests it, jumps up and down. It doesn't make a sound. He looks back at Stiles, raises one eyebrow. “You shouldn't waste your magic on things like that.”

Stiles laughs, “That's not how magic works, old man.”

 _Oh but it is_ , Derek wants to say, but Stiles already knows that. He thinks about Nortia's gift, an inheritance. He hopes it's for him: Stiles is already burning with magic and Derek doesn't want more blackened corpses. He'll take the burden himself, if that's what she wants.

That night, he dreams about fires and golden women rising from dark lakes, and moonlight.

There's something in the forest, a gust of cold air that turns into winds strong enough to bend branches on its way. To make the trees sing. Derek feels it on his skin -an exhale. A voice.

_This is my gift to you. My weapon; your choice._

“Why? What does it mean?” he screams in his dream, not strong enough to cover the chorus of trees but heard all the same. The golden woman smiles, a sad smile. “No, I don't understand! What do you want?”

She points, and Derek turns but he only sees darkness he can't focus on. When it gets too hard not to, he blinks, and there comes the light. In reverse, he sees with his eyes closed: a grave and a little girl holding his hand, and the _name_ carved in the stone–

He blinks the light away. “I don't understand,” he shouts again, turning back to her. There has to be a meaning to this, a purpose. His heart beats so hard he feels it through the veil of sleep. She smiles again, waiting for him to understand. But he doesn't. He doesn't know what she wants him to do, what this is.

“Please,” he whispers, tension draining from his shoulders as he lets go, as he starts to wake up. “Who is this little girl?”

 

The trees of the Preserve fly by so fast that Derek can't even tell if he's running in circles or not -the adrenaline coursing through his veins burned the humanity away until only the full shift remained. He's lost in the scents, the sounds, the blind panic of what he just realized.

How many days has it been, of seeing a future he couldn't recognize as such? Time isn't what he thought it was.

Stiles is everywhere in the Preserve, his magic infusing the very earth everywhere he walked; but he is nowhere. The spike of scent that should pinpoint his presence isn't in the forest, nor in the city. Fear grips Derek's bones and doesn't let go, not even when exhaustion makes him collapse -all he can see is the out-of-focus moon through the trees before even that disappears.

He wakes up.

Rust-colored curtains dance in the breeze smelling of home, bathing the room in bronze light. He doesn't recognize those– they're comfortingly familiar. Derek turns his head, soft fabric under his head, worn out by years. More solid than fire, the bookshelf is the only tangible thing in the room; only anchor to what Derek tries to hold on to as his own time.

He looks up at the wooden ceiling, patterned with knots that take shapes, wonders how something he hasn't lived yet can feel more real than memories.

“That was quite a nap,” a warm voice says, weight of its body shifting the couch under Derek's head. He focuses on their intermingling heartbeats to stop himself from moving, too afraid to shatter the moment and wake up lost in the woods. Wake up _before_.

Fingers start carding through his hair, making his breath hitch.

“So this is _you_ , huh? Your beautiful, looping mind brought you here?”

“I don't–” Derek tries to say but there's nothing but static where words should be.

“It's okay,” a soft hum turns into a chuckle, “you'll get the hang of it. You're looking for me, right? That's how you found me now. In your future.”

“Where are you?” Derek croaks out.

“Hmm,” the hand in his hair stops, “home, obviously,” then starts again.

“Can we–” Derek inhales, feeling like it's his first, “can we change any of it?”

The little girl holding his hand in front of a grave, the little girl in the hospital bed– it's coming. All of it, it hasn't happened yet; it's happening now; it will happen.

“Do you want to?” in a whisper, a little sad. Derek regrets having shared his knowledge -his curse- but a life lived with corrosive secrets is not a life Derek wants to live.

“Dad?” a little voice calls, and he turns his head. She's so tiny, still. “Why're you crying?” She's holding her comfort blanket in one hand, the wrecked piece of tissue trailing behind her in ribbons.

They day they adopt her, a baby still, they already know; but better be doomed and loved than to never be loved.

He blinks–

“Moonlight,” he says, crouched in front of her with her tiny shoulders under his massive hands. “It's not your fault your Papa died,” he reassures her, wipes the tears from her face. “He knew something he shouldn't have, and he tried to make it better,” and it's Derek's fault, it is, it _is it is_. But secrets.

“What was it?” she asks, eyes downcast, caught between wanting and dreading the answer.

What could Derek say? The last thing he wants to do is smile, but he does. It falls too soon. “There is a curse,” he tries, heavy with loss already, “that nothing can break.” He thinks about their garden, destined to die; he thinks he'll plant new flowers for her.

“But he loved you very much,” he hugs her tight, “and I love you very much.” Oh he can't wait to hold her again, for the first time.

 

Derek wakes up wolf again. Running is less urgent the second time, all the way home.

He stops at the edge of being seen from it, mind clearer than its ever been before; he gets it now, what the feeling in his heart was.

He joins Stiles where he's sitting on the porch, tears running down his face. Tools lay next to him - _hers_ \- and that's it then. Her last exhale. Her gift to them; a choice to set their destiny. Stiles looks up at Derek, who can't help but see the tombstone and think to himself _I know your name now_.

It's worth it, for the love filling up every empty space of him. And he has so much more to give.

His bones ache as he turns back human, words impatiently waiting to be gifted to Stiles. “I love you,” Derek whispers, voice hoarse.

Stiles' eyes go from sad to surprised to disbelieving to hopeful. It takes him three tries to get words out, wet from the tears. “Me too,” he sobs, sniffs and wipes his face on his shoulder, “you have shitty timing,” he laughs.

“I know,” Derek says, understanding an irony Stiles isn't aware of yet. “I'm the seer,” he explains, “so time is a little messed up right now.” He smiles.

Stiles looks at Derek for long seconds, an intensity in his eyes that has as much to do with magic than with just _Stiles_. “Prove it,” he defies him.

“What's this?” she asks, deceptively flushed with a burst of energy. She takes the small notebook, time damaged, from Derek's hands.

“Your grandmother's. And this,” he points to a bookmark, “was the one your papa loved the most.”

Derek pauses only long enough to appreciate the brown of Stiles' irises -a cradle in which things grow. “Your mom used to write poetry,” he says, remembering the verses of Stiles' favorite.

“How could you possibly know that?” Stiles whispers, awed.

“You'll tell me, someday.”

“And what else?”

Derek doesn't say anything, only puts his head on Stiles' shoulder to breathe him in. They still have a choice to make -one they've already made.

He still doesn't know why Nortia gave them this, or if it's really a blessing. But Stiles tentatively raises his arms, puts them around Derek.

Derek sighs. “I forgot how good it felt,” he says to himself, to both of them, to every version of them, “to be held by you.”

 

**Author's Note:**

>  _I watch the pain coming; what makes it worth it?_  
>  _A hundred generations and half a world away,_  
>  _our mothers holding fate in their hands, said–_  
>  _child, it's love._  
>  -Claudia Stilinski-
> 
>  
> 
>  **No matter if a story is new or old, a comment is always important to the author!**  
>  The poem (that I wrote fast so...) is an answer to a loose thread in the story, but also an explanation on why, even if it kills me, I didn't give them a happy _happy_ ending- it's kind of this message to keep on living despite the possibility of pain, despite literally knowing it's coming. Also, I held a two people poll and they were unanimous ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


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